“The whole idea is to preserve the Earth,” he had told the Miami Herald in 1982 after his high school valedictorian speech. He was eighteen and saying Earth should be designated as a national park. Now, four decades later, he had revised his speech, only slightly. Instead of using the national park line, he said that Earth should be “zoned residential and light industrial.” The point was the same: all “heavy industry” would move into space. He now called this the “Great Inversion”—mining for energy resources in space, while leaving Earth alone. This planet was finite, Bezos said, lacking the
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